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An actor's life for him

Did a young Benedict Cumberbatch have the makings of a great Hamlet when he was at Harrow?

Thomas W Hodgkinson

August 16 2015, 1:01am, The Sunday Times

Days of yore: The Taming of the Shrew, with Cumberbatch, bottom right, and Hodgkinson, left

Back in the brutal, joyless early 1990s, when we put on plays at Harrow School, all the female parts were done by boys. Of course they were. There were no girls. Then, as now, the school signed up to the mind-buckling notion that teenage boys, at the white-knuckle apex of their sexual appetites, should be corralled to take part in sweaty contact sports and perform opposite one another on stage in fervid romantic dramas.

Consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose main characters are called Puck and Bottom — enough to give you a general idea of the basic themes. It was in rehearsals for this Shakespearean fantasy that I first clapped eyes on a tiny scrap of pubescence whose name, I later learnt, was Benedict Cumberbatch.…

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